The Greeks and the Irrational

"You asked me to list five books that continue to influence the profession. But, as I made clear to you, I’m not interested in that any more. I’m interested in the books that have influenced me and will go on influencing me – as I work and teach and write – until I die. Those books include The Greeks and the Irrational , which still has an ongoing influence on me, particularly in my study of Yeats, Hart Crane and other great poets. “I’m a heretic. I like to say, ‘There is no God but God and his name is William Shakespeare.’” The Greeks and the Irrational is an exploration of the daemon , which is Christianised and reduced to demons or devils. But the daemon was a concept, as Dodds makes beautifully clear, having to do with the creative forces in the individual, which are deeper and more pervasive than what you might want to call the mere conscious. Though it’s not the unconscious in the Freudian sense, the daemon is the creative spirit. It is, as [Ralph Waldo] Emerson called it, “the God within”. Dodds was profoundly influenced by Freud. I also was deeply influenced by Freud. And for many, many years I was writing a vast commentary on Freud called Transference of Authority . I gave it up because of the ambivalence I began to develop towards him. If I live long enough, I may go back to the manuscript, which is yellowing up in the attic. But at 81, one doesn’t know how much time there is, and there are other things I’m writing and want to write. The theory of literary evolution I developed (which is refined, broadened and made more understandable to the common reader in The Anatomy of Influence ) is that literary inheritance, literary genealogy – the cavalcade that takes us from one writer to another, throughout the ages right down to the present moment – is by no means linear. It is based upon agonistic competition. I use the Shakespearean term “misprision”, which is a kind of deliberate creativeness. The later work overturns an earlier work in order to get free of it. The new poem, new story, new drama or new novel is a creative misreading of the work that engendered it."

"This is one of the books that made me decide that classics was worth spending a lifetime on. It starts with this extraordinary anecdote which is very meaningful for many readers. Dodds was at an exhibition of the Elgin Marbles at the British Museum and he got talking to a schoolboy. The boy told him: ‘I know it’s a terrible thing to say, but I don’t really like this stuff – it’s all so rational.’ Well, that got Dodds thinking about this common idea that the ancient Greeks were all very cerebral, gliding about in white gowns. But was Greek culture so fantastically rational? So Dodds wrote the book to explore that idea. It mattered to me because in order to understand about us, we have to understand what was at stake in the past. What is interesting is that you can take one of the most formative intellectual cultures and show that just underneath that sparkling surface is a seething heart of irrationality that results in madness and murder. Dodds wrote this book just after the Second World War and I think one of the questions in his mind was, not just that nice encounter in the British Museum, but how could European society have gone so mad that it did what it did. I wouldn’t say there are direct links between Hitler’s Germany and ancient Greece, but there are indirect links about where the non-rational elements are in any culture and how they work, how you can understand them and what difference that makes."